What happens when you hook a 1986 Mac up to the modern Internet
The wonderful thing about the Internet is that it lets people who love to do insane things instantly show off their creations to the rest of the world. One such person is Jeff Keacher, who has written at The Kernel about his experience hooking up his ancient 1986 Macintosh Plus up to the modern Internet via an incredibly lengthy and comically intricate process that involved installing the old-timey MacWeb 2.0 browser, hooking the computer up to a home network through a Raspberry Pi, and using a potpourri of archaic software and code tweaks to actually get the machine to properly render HTTP.
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The bottom line is, this crazy patchwork system somehow worked and was able to bring the Internet to an extremely old computer. And how did it look, you ask?
“It even looked surprisingly decent, almost like a mobile browser,” Keacher informs us. “Sure, it was slow as hell, but it worked! Data loaded, pages rendered, and links were clickable. Even forms sort of worked. Did I mention it was slow? It was slow. Soooo sloooow. Slow slow slow. Like, minutes to read and render a page slow.”
In other words, Keacher put a ridiculous amount of work into completing a project of questionable utility to achieve a result that delivered an extremely frustrating and subpar user experience. And Keacher is proud to have done it anyway. This really is why we love the Internet.
To get a look at how webpages look on a 1986 Mac Plus, check out Keacher’s full article by clicking here.
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This article was originally published on BGR.com
